Dulce et Decorum Est
by notanotherfanficauthor
Summary: A disturbed Stanley Coleman reflects on the transient nature of love. (One-shot, pre-SH3.)


AN: Hullo, just a creepy little one-shot featuring Stanley Coleman. I promise I'll be updating Claudia and Vincent soon.  
  
Enjoy.   
  
captain.  
  
-  
  
  
_It's a beautiful morning today. The sun is shining, the birds are chorusing their little hearts out, and I want to open the window and shout out to all the people below who are going about their business that **I am in love**!  
  
Love.   
  
It's such a wonderful emotion. No, it's more than that, runs deeper than anything as pedestrian as happiness or euphoria. It consumes your being, floods your veins like a drug and sets your whole soul alight with a renewal of purpose. It sharpens your vision, lends your whole outlook a crystal clarity which makes you giddy with the prospect of just dragging another breath of glorious air into your lungs.  
  
Because with every gasp of oxygen, with every thud of your trumpeting heart, you can feel Love coursing through you.   
  
Oh darling! Before I knew you, before you filled my senses with the sweet perfume of your radiance, how agonisingly mundane my pitiful life was! How hideously, tortuously dreary was this world before you stole my soul!  
  
My heart burns for you my love, like the desert sun, like the fires of a thousand funeral pyres, all mourning my celibacy and loneliness as it is set ablaze in a pyrophilic display of sacrifice to your beauty. It truly is a lament of destruction and delicious chaos, our love, our passion! Your eyes are like the purest of glass, but even now I can feel the force of your desire for me, your overwhelming kinship boring into me, making me clean and whole once more.  
  
I LOVE YOU!  
  
Oh god, I love you so much! I love you as though if this intensity of feeling subsided for just one, awful moment, I would shrink and die from the cruel agony of fate's tender caress!  
  
Last night was the most beautiful experience of my life, when our bodies joined as one. You didn't say much, but I knew...I knew my darling that you were as enamoured as I. How joyous is our life together!  
  
You are the most wonderful listener, my sweet. You are never distracted, when I speak you watch me with those beautiful eyes, you always hear me out. I sing a hymn to the nights where we sat, in this glorious room which has become our paradise, myself talking, spilling out my soul to you as you drank my words in with that oh so endearing, oh so tender silence which shows me how much I mean to you.  
  
You never talk much. You always listen. Always look. It truly is a most symbiotic balance of beauty and wisdom.  
  
I love you.  
  
I love you.  
  
I LOVE YOU!  
  
My partner, my lover, my most cherished possession."  
_  
Stanley Coleman set his pen down and took a deep breath, "But, alas, I feel that you tire of me sometimes, my love..." he murmured to the object of his affections, who was tucked up in bed safely.  
  
He swatted away a fly, which buzzed about his head with a persistent urgency.  
  
There were so many flies, these days. Were they trying to tell him something? He listened intently for a few moments, but could not discern anything important in the low buzz of the winged insect.  
  
With a blissful smile, he rose to his feet and climbed back into the bed with his lover, leaning over tenderly to stroke her cheek.  
  
But today, something wasn't quite right. Her beauty, that morning star of his life, was fading, he realised.  
  
He covered her lips with his, but she remained so cold. So impassive.  
  
"Darling..." he whispered, his voice choked with despondency, "Darling, why do you torture me so?"  
  
She did not reply.  
  
"Darling, have I done something to upset you?"  
  
Stony silence. Her face frozen in a mask of disdain.  
  
"I love you?" he ventured.  
  
Still she had no answer for him, no words of comfort. He stroked her neck, brushing away a maggot which marred her perfect skin, his heart aching.  
  
Like a lightning flash illuminating a car crash, the delusion slipped away from his vision, and for a hideous moment, Stanley Coleman saw his lover for what she really was.  
  
A decayed mockery of what had once been a beautiful young woman, garrote marks on her neck, her putrifying face frozen in a deathhead grin, maggots and flies and all manner of foul and unclean insects swarming about her face, feasting on the rotting skin of her grotesquely alabaster form.  
  
He jumped back with an exclamation of nausea, covering his face with his hands, pounding at his temples with white knuckled fists.  
  
Then it passed.  
  
He took a deep breath. The air no longer stank of decay, but pervaded his nostrils with the scent of roses, and a beautiful summers day.  
  
"My love..." he smiled fondly as he pulled back the sheets and snuggled his head into her bony shoulder.  
  
They were so happy together, he thought with a smile.  
  
So content.  
  
So blissful.  
  
_So in love_.


End file.
